Summary

If you’re a transactional attorney or a legal engineer / data scientist, you’re probably aware that the SEC’s EDGAR filing database contains perhaps the largest database of public domain contracts in the world. While the SEC has improved the search functionality on their website in recent years, it’s still fairly clunky to search the archive and exporting filed contracts in bulk is not possible.If you’re looking for public domain contracts to use as samples in or to provide data for your legal technology research or products, there are not a lot of options. Sure, there are paid services like Lexis Securities and LawInsider, but both of these have their limitations, particularly when it comes to massive bulk exports, and both cost cost money. OpenEDGAR is an extremely fast and accurate parser that downloads raw SEC EDGAR archives, separates out the filing Exhibits into their own separate files and lets you extract or save the resulting documents. It’s built on top of the Django framework, so all of the downloaded data is stored in a relational database that logs not only filed documents, but also the company that filed them, the specific filing they were included in and other filing meta data.